9/22/15
When I first got on the FF Helmer Hannsen on the morning of Tuesday, September 22nd, my first impression was that of an underground bunker. The smell of fish and salt, the dark, small cabins, the metal hatches, the flickering fluorescent lights of of the area we would be living for the next week seemed like a submarine or a fall-out shelter.
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| Boarding the FF Helmer Hannsen |
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| This ship was a former fish trawler, turned into a research vessel a decade ago by the University of Tromsø |
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| My cabin for the next week |
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| Of course there's a gas mask cabinet in the hallway |
But then we had a tour of the upper decks of the ship. The upper hallways are well-lit, have wooden inlays, and there are black couches and TVs i many rooms. The mess hall looks like a little diner with swiveling chairs and juice dispensers. Doughnuts and fresh fruit were available. I ate doughnuts and melon and drank peach ice tea and OJ. I didn’t even realize we were moving and had already left Adventdalen until I looked out the window. A couple of us went out on deck and took pictures of the snow-covered mountains. It was incredibly beautiful. Of course, my camera kept malfunctioning.
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| Through the porthole |
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| Our map of our course |
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| The messhall |
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| Cake Time, a twice-daily occurence |
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| The lounge next to the mess hall |
A graduate student along with us on the research cruise is investigating the seepage of methane from sea floor pocks, and so he went with a number of students to take a core of the sea floor in Billenfjorden to take methane samples. i went outside in rubber boots and a helmet with them to watch the process.
At 1pm we had a safety briefing from the first mate: be quiet, meet on deck in case of emergencies, listen for alarms, both the fire alarm and the ‘channel alarm, survival suits could be found in the cabinet next to the instrument room.
Lunch was cabbages in cream sauce, sausages in brown sauce, and potatoes. While eating it, I said that my inner ear is so weak, the motion of the boat didn’t affect me at all. The fact that as I write this days later, the mention of these foods begins to make me sick indicates my mistake. Prof. Julian Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute sat with us and told us of the centennial of Shackleton’s voyage celebration at the SPRI building, and how the prince of Monaco may come. I may have seen a small bergy bit of sea-ice. Vanilla pudding for dessert. The ship had reached open water, and the rocking of the ship was making trying to read scientific papers a futile attempt. I had a little knob of ginger, but it was only helping so much. I needed to go outside to get some fresh air, but getting from the mess hall area to my room to get my coat was so hard. I made it to the laundry room below where the sudden smell of fish and a large swell sent me running to the trash can to give my sacrifice to Poseidon.
Thankfully there were sinks and disinfectant readily available. My classmate Marianna came down the stairs as I was scrubbing the floor, and with as much volume as I could, I raised my hand and said: “Stop.” She scurried back up. She was apparently going downstairs to get something for another person suffering from sea-sickness. I made it to my room to get my coat, and then I climbed onto the deck to recover.
It was nice to stare into the wind, and singing Owl City songs helped. I was not alone. There were a number of fellow sufferers, and I was informed that the day’s lectures were being postponed until the next morning. I was falling asleep outside in the cold, so I went back inside to lay on my bunk as the world rolled back and forth beneath me. It was like a drunken hangover that never ended. Dinner was served at 7:30pm, Indian curry with rice. Ha, like I could stomach that at this moment. I ate a small meal of rice, cucumbers, and watermelon. After dinner I drew in my journal until I was no longer sick, then went to sleep.
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| my sea-sick drawings |
9/23
Woke up feeling groggy, but overall normal. I felt a little weird eating on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when most people who are over thirteen and in good health fast. But it was a normal day for everyone else, and I needed energy to work, so I enjoyed a breakfast of toast with eggs and lox and with peanut butter and Nugatti spread. I went back to my room to shower, but the girls with whom me and my room-mate Andy share a bathroom forgot to unlock the bathroom door from our side, so I went outside instead. We were approaching Moffen Island, famous for its walruses. I watched our approach from the bridge-room. With a broken camera and no binoculars, I could only see a pile of grey blobs several hundred meters away on a small island. It was disappointing, and I wasn’t the only person to think so. I tried to get to the foredeck for a better look, but I got lost and gave up. I took a very quick shower, then went to lectures. Sisi and some others saw walruses swim up right next to the ship. I showed my camera to Andy, who held it up, then held it to my ear: I could hear loud crunching sounds coming from within. Lectures were starting, and someone gave me a shushing finger. I gave her the most passive aggressive thumbs-up I could muster. I was in a very bad mood.
After lectures, I went up to the instrument room and was able to borrow a small screwdriver which I used to open the casing on my camera to remove some of the grit. My camera now worked as long as you didn’t try to zoom in and out too quickly, and sometimes required me to manually push the lens back in after turning it off. I also helped to take apart Svenya’s microphone for hearing loss, which the professor had gotten sea water into. Opening and closing it didn’t help, but I at least didn’t break it more. Lunch was stringy codfish with potatoes in cream sauce. Dessert was pistachio and pecan ice cream with chocolate sauce, which I ate quite a bit of. I spoke to Julian Dowdeswell more about SPRI, and tried to impress him so that he remembers me when I send it my application to his Master’s program. There were no lectures in the afternoon and my group, Group 2, didn’t have box coring until late at night. I went outside and took more pictures, read articles, and went outside some more. We were very far north, the islands we passed were barren and vegetation-less. Yet sea-birds and (allegedly) whales were all around us.
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| Sketch of an island we we passed |
Dinner was pasta, couscous, lox and bread. I wanted to sleep after dinner, but instead I needed to run up and down to try to get my bathroom unlocked. Finally, I was ready to sleep lying in bed, but the chirping of the shallow acoustic profile sensor kept me awake like a singe very loud, syncopated cricket.
9/24
At 1:30AM, I woke up and got ready for box coring. At 1:55AM, we heard an alarm go off, and were panicked wondering what to do. It stopped, and we went back to waiting. Ten minutes after that, an instructor came, and we put on full-body insulated, waterproof suits called Regatta suits, hard hats, rubber boots, and thick, waterproof mittens and went outside. The temperature was a little below freezing, and we were at 81ºN, 22ºE, water depth 323 m. It was dark and cold, but there wasn’t too much wind. We walked along the length of the deck with a long hose to the spot where the box core machine would drop our large container of surface sediment. We waited for around ten minutes as the winch dropped the apparatus to the bottom, it snapped shut, and then was winched back up. It was a full box of soft mud. After our instructor Katrine took a surface sample for foraminifera, I siphoned off the top water and we took pictures (it seemed like everyone’s camera was having issues). Then we sieved the top 10cm with cold seawater. In my thick gloves, I was worried about letting the sieve slip overboard. My right glove got wet, and my hand quickly became numb. In the end, we found very few rocks, but a number of worms and nereids, which I had to fling out with a pencil.
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| Our coring sites, The box core (HH15-04) on the left and the gravity core (HH15-08) on the right |
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| Our box core |
We then needed to wash everything. This involved shoveling the heavy mud over the side of the ship and then scrubbing the deck with water and a broom. “Don’t forget to do your morning pull-ups” the professor said as I struggled to shovel mud with my numb hands. This was hell. After an eternity, we were done and we could go back inside and take off our suits. I ran around some more trying to figure out if I had a night shift for instrument watch (I didn’t) and then fell in to a fitful sleep. I dreamed of a Japanese woman with waxen skin and a large red oval painted on her forehead who stared at me silently. When I woke up, I could finally feel my fingertips again.
I spent the morning categorizing the rocks we found based on size, angularity, and lithology. Our biggest clast was 8mm long, and most were smaller than 2mm. Evelyn Dowdeswell was impressed with my hand-eye coordination that I was able to transfer from all my ostracod picking. I went outside to see the northernmost islands of Svalbard’s archipelago, and my camera seemed to be behaving. While I was outside, my group mates were splitting open rocks to determine their lithology. I am crap at determining lithology when I’m on little sleep. Lunch was meat and lingonberries. The new tropical fruit juice was really good. Dessert was chocolate-covered ice cream popsicles.
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| Tiny little rocks that we found on the ocean floor |
At three, we went outside to do gravity coring. We put on our Regatta suits and walked to the deck to prepare the corer. We screwed the cutter (a sharp metal core with a hollow core) and catcher (a ring of interlocking metal blades that allow sediment to go through one way) into the base of core tube and watched the crew lower the core into the moon-hole - the hole in the center of the deck. It took around twenty minutes for the corer to sink and then be lifted back up. We pulled the plastic core liner out from the metal tube, and I took the collected mud form the catcher and cutter and put int into a labelled plastic bag (my specialty is putting mud into bags). We then measured out the length of the cores, labelled, sawed through at our marks (my poor tired arms), capped them with plastic plugs, labelled, and finally brought them inside to warm to room temperature.
(pictures will be here soon)
By the time this was done, it was time for dinner: chicken, french fries, onion rings, and more lox and crisp bread. I was exhausted, but I had instrument watch from midnight to 2am. I went to sleep immediately after dinner so I could be awake for it, but it seemed like as soon as I put my head on the pillow it was time to head up to the bridge for my watch.
To be continued
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